Re: Is bulk migrating really a good idea?
On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 02:32:46PM +0000, mortenkjeldgaard wrote:
> I don't thinks so. While it may be easier, it means that we are going to miss an opportunity to thoroughly revamp and revise the Debian wiki so it's much more useful for users. Bulk migration means also migrating the totally chaotic organization and structure of the old Debian wiki.
>
> My suggestion is to take the front page from the Archwiki and place it here. The organization of the Arch wiki front page can be ported pretty much unchanged, and placeholders can be created for the links on the front page. Then we can work on filling out the subpages one by one, taking material from the old wiki where relevant.
>
> In my opinion the Debian wiki should be the main goto reference place for users, filling a similar role to Archwiki for Arch users. The purpose of the Debian wiki up to now has in practice been a place for the various Debian teams, but in the new wiki that activity should be redirected to a specific section of the wiki called Teams.
>
> Cheers, Morten
>
> PS: I posted a message similar to this in the Talk section of the new wiki but I guess the discussion really takes place on this mailing list, so I am reposting it here and expanding a bit.
Restructuring the wiki is a good idea, but if we create an empty new wiki,
people will either copy the existing chaos faster than we can populate it in an
orderly manner, or will feel excluded and stop contributing altogether.
"Recent page visit statistics"[0] shows the 100 most-visited pages during
a representative recent period. The front page is the most-visited page
(2,900 visits), but of the links on the front page, only these made the list:
Visits Page
-------------------------------
2162 DebianReleases
789 DesktopEnvironment
480 DebianInstall
284 Software
That suggests information about installing Debian should be very prominent,
but the rest of the links could do with rethinking. The bulk of that work
is just about going through hundreds (or thousands) of pages and deciding
how to categorise them. So for starters, which Arch category would you put
each top 100 page in?
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-wiki/2025/07/msg00039.html
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-wiki/2025/08/msg00002.html
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